My backlog extends beyond Steam... devonrv’s profile
In other words, you’ll occasionally see me post about…maybe not obscure, but perhaps unexpected games. I’ve already brought up such titles as Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean as well as Fluidity, and you can expect more in the future.
As for my BLAEO wheel: whenever I buy a game on Steam, I always play it a little bit right then so that nobody can say that I bought a bunch of Steam games I’ve never played. That said, I’m going to keep a game labeled as “never played” until I reach it in my backlog and plan on playing it actively.
Also, since there are some games I never plan on 100%ing, I’ll probably just use “beaten” for all the games that I’ve beaten, even if I’ve technically “completed” them as well. I’ll use “unfinished” for when I plan on going back to play all of a game’s content, even if I’ve technically beaten it already.
Lastly, here’s my review of my favorite game, as well as an explanation of differences between all of puzzle’s sub-genres (something not many people seem to know): https://www.backlog-assassins.net/posts/db8kgjb Now edited to include a link to my review of its GB version and its postgame!
Been going through my itch.io backlog some more, and as usual, it’s taking me a while to find another game I can recommend without any caveats. Frog Hop has a decent amount of content, but level design is kinda mediocre and sometimes aimless (which makes trying to find the collectibles extra annoying). Plus, the zoomed-in nature of the screen can result in some blind jumps/cheap hits, and the bosses–particularly the final boss–have attacks that you just have to memorize their foreshadow animations to be able to dodge them. Also, it’s $5, which might seem cheap if you’re used to the standard $20-$30 for indie games, but for this game, that price is a stretch at best.
Then there’s Gun Princess 2, which is a free metroidvania with more engaging level design and enemy patterns, but it also suffers from its final boss having cheap hits. Plus, it has this annoying mechanic where you have to wait for your main gun to reload ammo slowly, and this is on top of your other guns having finite ammo that only refills at save points. You also have to backtrack aaaaalll the way back to the ruins if you want to buy some of the items that you’d never have enough money to afford when you first get there, and I beat the game with less than half of the money you’d need to buy the “earn more money” item. Wasn’t a fan of its forward momentum, either.
Super Robot Ninja Girl is another free game, this one being a short platformer which does away with that slowly-refilling-ammo mechanic and forward momentum, but the game is entirely carried by the enemies’ SHMUP-style bullet patterns since the level design itself is quite flat (even moreso than Frog Hop). Plus, its final boss might just be the cheapest out of this bunch; I was only able to win by tanking hits with a full set of health after dying to it previously. I’m also not too keen on its lives system, but then again, the game is short enough that you don’t have to worry too much about getting game over (I only died twice).
Lastly, Xydonia Alpha 3 was ALMOST a solid recommendation, being a highly polished Shoot-em-up with decent level design, okay bosses, and lots of spectacle. Thing is, when you beat the first level, you get three different choices for which to play as the second level–and it’s already annoying enough having to replay the first stage three times to see everything, but the more you play, the more you start to notice certain things:
- The boss of the middle second level (Stage 1B) has its weak point on top of it, which doesn’t give you much room or time to hit it with your rightward-shooting guns. Sure, the green gun has an upgrade that lets it shoot vertically, but you lose all your upgrades when you die, which will certainly happen when this boss’s missiles blindside you by suddenly shooting out fast, 8-way projectiles when they’re destroyed. Also, these bosses take way too long to defeat if you’re downed to your default guns.
- The boss of the bottom second level (Stage 1C) has a move where it suddenly emits blue smoke from its mouth which is also harmful even though it just looks like a visual effect (in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s just a blue recolor of the harmless explosion graphics).
- The third and final level is always the same no matter which second level you pick, and it’s also the one with the repetitive snake boss that does the same thing it already did twice during the regular stage. That said, at least with this one, you can just pause+quit so you don’t have to replay THIS level again.
- The game never tells you this, but the characters in the character selection have weaker weapons the further right you go. If you play as the rightmost character, it’s bad enough that the levels themselves also become kinda tedious. Meanwhile, if the leftmost character is fully upgraded, he can sometimes defeat certain bosses before they’ve cycled their pattern once.
- The meteors in the first stage don’t stand out too well considering one of them comes at you from the left at a decent speed (and that tiny red arrow warning about it also isn’t very eye-catching, either).
But the biggest one of all: the full game never came out even though it had a fully-funded Kickstarter campaign, last updated 2020. I don’t see much harm coming from playing this free alpha build; just keep in mind that this is likely all that will ever exist (perhaps even all that was intended to exist).
Top down puzzle. Arrow keys move, X undoes your moves, and Z is the confirm button for menus. The goal is to move over every tile without moving onto the same tile twice; a fairly common puzzle-type, and sure enough, a lot of the early levels are pretty boring and easy. That said, the game does start to get more challenging as the game progresses, and sure, part of that is because each world introduces new gimmicks and you’ll start to have trouble keeping up with all of them, but there were also quite a few levels where I did remember what everything did and yet still had to think about how to solve the level for a couple minutes or so. Some of the levels near the end are larger than what the screen shows, which is always annoying since you have to burn an attempt simply to scout ahead, but at least there are only a few of them.
Plus, the game’s free, so I can definitely recommend it. There’s also a paid, non-mini version, but looking at its screenshots, the only thing that stands out to me is that it has more gimmicks, including a darkness gimmick of all things, so this free version might ironically be the better game by virtue of keeping its scope somewhat limited in comparison.
Hey, can someone tell media to stop becoming lost? It’s getting on my nerves.

Platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, X attacks, and Y switches between two characters: the guy has a ranged weapon and can jump higher and can charge his shots to break blue walls, and the girl…can break red brick tiles with her sword, which is a bit more powerful than the guy’s regular shots but not as strong as his charged shots. They both share a health bar. Gems are scattered throughout the game’s three levels, and if you get 999, you temporarily get an attack upgrade that lasts until your gem counter drains back to 0.
The plot is stupid, but like with most games of this type, it’s really just an excuse for the gameplay to happen, and the gameplay is fine. There’s a small variety of enemies and other hazards, with the only annoying one being the chainsaws that turn the same color as the walls when they’re not moving (sure, they’re harmless at that point, but you also get caught off guard when they suddenly stop being harmful). The level design is equally varied, even having a couple vertical segments where you have to run from instakill hazards.
For the most part, the worst thing about the game is how there’s no options menu, so you won’t know how to turn off the CRT filter unless you check one of the external txt files. However, the game itself started to lose me with its bosses. First, the level 1 boss doesn’t do much more than shamble around and shoot a single projectile every now and then that can be destroyed with your upgraded gun; it can easily be killed before it finishes doing a second thing. Then, the second boss can’t be damaged by your attacks at all; you have to wait for a bomb to drop and then knock it into the boss, but at least it only takes three bombs to kill it.
However, the final boss was when this game really tried my patience. First, it kept crashing when trying to transition to the final boss’s room, and since the dev had taken the game down, the only way I could get this bug fixed was to use UndertaleModTool and try messing around with the offending gml file myself (I switched back to the original game after the transition worked so that I could be sure nothing afterward was my fault). Then, the boss’s first phase is another wait-to-attack where you just have to wait in the corners for the boss to shoot missiles into its own fists. Its second phase was passable, being a head that flies around and shoots at you, but not only is it too high to attack half the time, it also doesn’t give decent (any?) feedback on if you’re doing damage to it or not (which is kinda critical for a game that keeps flip-flopping between your typical always-vulnerable bosses and invulnerable wait-to-attack ones). The third phase has it walk left and right, occasionally jumping and shooting descending projectiles before stopping and doing that Mega Man Xtreme 2 thing where it’s only vulnerable to one character based on a color hint. At least you get a checkpoint between each boss phase to make them more manageable.
Overall, I did find this game a bit hard to recommend, but what convinced me to make this post were 1) it was permafree before being delisted, so it’s not like this is piracy: https://web.archive.org/web/20201129223605/http://amon26.itch.io/williu 2) this guy also asked for the game to be reuploaded, so I figured I’d also share my upload link for all of you in case something happens to those links at some point, and 3) I spent quite a few minutes fixing that crash bug and selfishly want as many people to know about and benefit from it as possible. Besides, I figure some of you probably already have the game in your backlogs and would appreciate knowing about a potential fix for that crash should it happen to you, too.
Anyway, you can download the original game here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/vysys9frqvcpcrd/WilliU_1.1.5.zip/file
and my crashfix here: www.mediafire.com/file/36a9zuotzb6pgtc/WilliU_1.1.5.0.√-1+crashfix+version.zip/file
(I credited myself under my itch.io username, just in case my tweaked credits txt file confused you).
Got caught up playing a bunch of random free itch.io games again.

Platformer. You start off unable to jump, so you go to the left and use updrafts to get around spikes until you get the jump upgrade…and then you have to backtrack across that same section despite the rooms being symmetrical and thus functionally making you do the same stuff twice. Oh well, at least that part is only a minute long or so. The right side has some solid platforming (except the room with the frogs that does little besides make you wait), and when you get the Flappy-Bird-style “tap jump in midair to keep flying” power, there’s an entirely separate section you go through that’s built around the power instead of the game making you backtrack again, which is nice. The end of the game is above the start point, so if you go there, you’ll miss a secret on the left that requires the flying power, so you’d have to replay the whole ~5-minute-long game–on top of going back through the left section a third time in a single playthrough–to see the disappointing secret room that one of the comments already has a screenshot of that shows you everything it has to offer (for real, it doesn’t even have a second line of dialogue)…and then you’d have to backtrack through the left area again to reach the game’s main ending.
Overall, though, it’s decent for a free jam game, so I can recommend it. You can play it here: https://daz.itch.io/apollo
If you got One Gun Guy when it was free, it’s an okay little game, but at its base price of $5–or even its sale price of $0.70–it’s much harder to recommend. Not only is the entire game only around 20 minutes long, but the level design can be kinda repetitive at times, with more than a few areas that just make you stop and wait on stuff (the frequent invincibility powers are mostly just used to skip the waiting–assuming they’re not in a position where you can’t even get back to the enemies before the power runs out). Worse, hard mode doesn’t change the level design at all (at least for the few minutes I tried it); it just disables your power-ups, and when I took a break, I learned that the game doesn’t save your progress at all: if you don’t beat the entire game in one sitting, you have to start the whole game over from the beginning.
Without being free, it really pales in comparison to actual free games, like this one:
Platformer, no controller support. A moves left, D moves right, W jumps (IIRC you can also use spacebar if you want), and holding left-click draws a platform like in Kirby Canvas/Rainbow Curse. Platforms slowly start to disappear after a second or two, and the game has trouble filling your platform meter back up when it’s supposed to, so to get around this, you can simply right-click to remove all drawn platforms instantly while also filling your platform meter back up to full.
Level design is okay, but as you can probably guess by the total playtime, this game doesn’t exactly reach its full potential, either. The game introduced no-drawing zones? All you can do otherwise is move and jump (and wall-jump and grab ledges). The game introduced turrets? Just draw a line to block them. The game combined turrets with no-drawing zones?? Yeah, just keep running left; you can pretty much keep pace with them until you reach the next drop. The only time I actually had some trouble was when the game reused the path-opening blobs but quietly made it timed, yet you also have to ride a moving platform up so you can wall-jump up the no-drawing shaft; it’s always irritating when the game makes you do a timed challenge that involves you having to wait on stuff.
Overall, though, it’s a decent little game, and I can recommend it since it’s free.

Yeah, I’m a couple months late on this because not only did I not finish playing all the demos before Next Fest ended (as usual), I didn’t even finish before redeeming my last month of Game Pass, so that was another delay. However, I’m finally done now and can post all of my recommendations (in no particular order):
Platformers
Always a lot of good ones each time
Never played the originals, or even the 2.5D sequel from a few years ago, but this one seems like a promising 3D platformer. My only concerns are that the ball form is kinda hard to control and that level 3 doesn't do a great job of letting you know ahead of time that the only way to cross the bridge in time is by using the ball form's extra speed, so I ended up having to redo that segment.
Kinda like Steamworld Dig where you have to dig for materials and head back to the surface to unload them while also avoiding the occasional spike or enemy. Not sure I'd buy a full version of this, but the demo is okay.
Level design is pretty simple, but again, not bad for the price of free. The motorcycle skeleton boss is pretty tedious if you try to avoid damage, but goes down pretty quick if you tank a hit or two to get multiple hits in yourself.
Oh hey look, another Celeste clone. If you leave a room too soon after collecting a Yin-Yang symbol, it doesn't actually count as being collected, and if you're too close to a teardrop when you dash, it won't actually give you another dash like it's supposed to, but everything else worked fine.
Solid fixed-camera 3D platformer, but there was one optional left-to-right segment with forward/backward-moving platforms where the camera was too low for you to judge their depth properly, making it much harder than it otherwise would have been. Levels are fairly linear, not unlike Super Mario 3D World, but it still has collectathon elements with the candies, and the demo doesn't give clues or unlock alternate starting positions for players who beat a level and want to go back for any candies they missed.
Between the lengthy cooldown your powers have and how long it takes for that one character's amulet to activate mechanisms, this game is REALLY slow at first. However, if you stick with it, the levels start being designed more around these elements so their sluggish nature isn't as big a problem.
A metroidvania that tries to have both real time shooting combat and Undertale-style turn-based combat. As you might expect, those genres don't exactly blend well with each other, so you'd need to be able to enjoy both gameplay styles separately to appreciate this game. I also had some control issues, but according to the game's announcements, many of those issues have been fixed.
The emphasis on speed definitely gives this game a different feel than the first game had. Jumping also felt shorter, and I think that's a combination of the camera being zoomed out more and the level design encouraging charged jumps, which ironically kills the intended fast pace since you have to hold the down button for a second to charge it. Levels still have three coins, but the HUD also displays a white square that I was never able to figure out what it was for; my best guess is that you get a stamp there for beating the level fast enough, but I'm not doing that. Also, apparently, one of the demo's two levels is gonna be exclusive to the demo and not in the full game, which is…a choice.
Decent controls and solid level design, but no stage select, so if you skip a collectible, you've missed it permanently. Also, the cyan hexagons that are supposed to let you keep jumping in midair can sometimes be finicky and not work when it looks like they should've.
This game shakes up the Celeste formula by also making you pick up boxes and throw them onto switches to open the path forward. Plus, the boss's chase sequence is broken up by fixed-position rooms where you actually have to go hit a switch or something while avoiding the boss's projectiles, though it's kinda cheap where the path opens up, but the game won't let you go forward, and then suddenly the boss zooms across the screen into that path (even though it just got shown retreating into that path), so you'll get hit and die if you're already there trying to progress.
The first GB Studio platformer I actually had some fun with, though it was still pretty easy, and it wouldn't surprise me if the full game just stalls out and spins its wheels after this.
The first boss was kinda cheap at times, and the demo ended right before the second boss, but the level design was pretty good, utilizing its color-switching mechanic and grapple ability well. I probably would've bought this game in the current winter sale if not for my backlog ballooning from free games over the past couple months.
A promising platformer, though I'm a bit concerned about its approach to puzzle elements since the hub area at the demo's end has a blocked off area that is NOT opened by pushing switches that correspond to the three numbers a few levels prior.
The graphics can make it kinda hard to tell what's where, and the jumping mechanic is a bit too physics-based, but if you can get past that, the demo isn't too bad.
A simple platformer (so simple that you always jump the same height no matter how long you hold the jump button), but it has a fair bit of challenge in it. I did have some trouble when trying to wall jump away from walls, though.
An okay platformer where you can also rotate the room 90 degrees. The only "puzzle" elements are the fact that everything is monochrome, so you'll sometimes have to look around for a bit to figure out where the safe spots will be after rotating the room.
Almost skipped this one because the mouse-over preview didn't show any actual platforming; I had to click it to open its store page and watch the full trailer to see that. This one lets you flip gravity, even in midair after jumping, but you have to collect an item to flip gravity again before landing. No enemies, but it does have moving spikes, which might make it too dynamic to be a pure Celeste clone, but the full game could still easily head down that road anyway. Also, the intro scene is kinda slow.
A decent first-person 3D platformer, though I'm not too keen on the standard running mechanic being replaced by bunny-hopping; it's kinda gimmicky and doesn't exactly improve the experience. Also, I'm pretty sure the game never tells you that you can double-jump, which changes things.
A Metroidvania with level design that can be a bit too simple at times, but it shows promise and the boss is okay. Plus, it has some good humor.
An okay 3D collectathon. Something neat it does that I haven't seen another game do is that you can simply walk away from NPCs mid conversation to cut the cutscene early, but if you talk to them again, it picks up right where you left off. Unfortunately, this means if there are enemies nearby that you didn't notice, you can get attacked mid-conversation and end up missing that line until you manually finish the cutscene and talk to the NPC again. Also, you don't actually get the ability to collect the Stamps until you bypass seven of them and speak to the postmaster.
Level design is kinda flat with the occasional cheap pitfall trap, but is otherwise not too bad. Enemies can be damage sponges, but the only time I remember having to fight one was the world 1 boss, so you can just jump over the rest. I didn't like how the optional level in world 1 was just a harder version of the world 1 boss, though, so I skipped that level. It was also kinda annoying having to backtrack to that one NPC each time you pick up a single mana globule for the first few levels, but the levels themselves are designed so that you never have to do too much backtracking as a result of this mechanic (such as how the NPC in question shows up again in later parts of each level).
A solid 3D platformer where you can only perform your 3d-Sonic-the-Hedgehog-style homing dash attack by pushing the correct button in rhythm. Only things I didn't like was that level 3 could sometimes be a bit confusing as to where you needed to go, and the boss makes you wait 8 seconds between each of its six phases, which is too much waiting. Hopefully, at least that last one will be fixed in an update.
Although many rooms make you kill all enemies to open the door to the next room, the game is still fast-paced and fluid since all enemies die in one hit and you attack by dashing (which can be done in multiple directions, not just horizontally). Disappointingly, it ends in a chase sequence instead of a boss, and the chase itself is kinda long and easy, but the demo is still pretty fun overall.
Tapping the jump button keeps you flying upward, but you have limited stamina and no stamina meter to show exactly how much is left, just your character flashing red when it gets low. Level design is decent, but some levels can go on for too long without a checkpoint. The boss is also a notable drop in difficulty.
A 10 Second Ninja clone. Moment-to-moment gameplay is responsive and fast paced, but end-of-level rankings could be streamlined a bit, and there's no full-level preview before starting a level.
Fast-paced momentum platformer where you can shoot away from the direction you're moving to boost your momentum further (no enemies to shoot at, IIRC). Sometimes, you end up moving too fast to have time to react to what's coming, but levels are short and respawns are quick, so it's not too big a problem. Each world introduces a new gimmick, so the full game could end up being kinda gimmicky.
Yet another decent platformer. Some minor things every now and then didn't quite work, but it's pretty good overall.
Shoot-'em-Ups
Not as many this time; did I forget to check a tag or something?
I can't help but feel that the full game will be another one of those where you'll have to beat the whole game with a limited set of lives/continues. The demo is fine, though, even having short challenge missions that do save your progress on a level-by-level basis.
An okay Shmup, though the camera-twisting can be a bit disorienting. Bosses are designed around being not-damage-spongy when you don't have any bombs, but this also means they go down pretty quick if you even use just one bomb.
Another continue-limited Touhou clone. There's always a couple of these that show up each Next Fest, but unlike the demo for CORA, I actually made it to the end of this one instead of losing all my lives/continues and getting sent back to the beginning, so this is the demo that gets my recommendation. Still, the knowledge that this same thing could happen in the full game is what prevents me from buying them.
This game is basically a boss rush of Touhou-style bosses, but it makes each boss phase its own level, each death only makes you redo that specific phase/level, and clearing the phase saves your progress so you don't have to beat the game (or even that boss) in one sitting. There's even a stage select so you can retry specific phases without starting the game over, and you even get a different-colored stamp if you beat a phase without using your equipped defensive item. Plus, it has quite a bit of content for a free demo. Heck, the different difficulties are actually meaningfully different with alternate shot patterns instead of just giving the bosses more HP or making them faster! Sure, the whole game is just boss phases instead of having any normal Shmup/Bullet-Hell levels, but ever since I realized how so many Shmups are stuck with that outdated 1980s mentality of limiting lives/continues and forcing a total restart if you lose them all, I'll always praise a Shmup that does the bare minimum of having proper save points.
Still, as much as I like this demo, there are some downsides. First, each world (or "day" as the game calls them) ends with a level that just makes you go through all the world's individual-phase levels in a row, defeating the entire reason why I like the game. Thankfully, though, those levels are optional, at least in the demo (in fact, you don't even have to beat all the individual-phase levels to unlock the next world). Next, the difficulty starts at easy, and although the banner at the bottom says to push L+B to change the difficulty, this doesn't work. I played through almost the entire demo on Easy before I finally figured out how you actually change the difficulty: hold LB and push RT! The game is well-made enough that I still replayed on increasingly higher difficulties and mostly enjoyed my time doing so, but I started noticing some cracks in the facade as I did: when replaying on Normal, I noticed that bosses would often have more health than they needed, so the bullet pattern would loop multiple times and start getting repetitive before they finally went down. On Hard, I noticed that the game freezing on death doesn't actually help you figure out what killed you like I initially thought because not only does the game keep going for a split second after death before freezing (so you can end up overlayed on a completely different bullet and get mislead on how you died), but the specific bullet that kills you DISAPPEARS! I like challenge, but being able to figure out where I went wrong on death is kinda crucial to make the challenge enjoyable. Finally, on Lunatic difficulty, I figured out the real reason the bullet hell genre is so notoriously difficult to get into: the small light on your character that indicates the location of your hitbox…doesn't indicate the size of your hitbox, which is actually way smaller than even that small circle. There isn't even a smaller circle within it to indicate your actual hitbox's size; you just kinda have to figure that out yourself while getting swarmed with bullets whose gaps are less than 1/6th the width of your already-small hitbox indicator. Between this and the issues I noticed in previous difficulties, there were three phases I just gave up on in Lunatic difficulty (1-6, 2-5, and 3-6).
That said, I still highly recommend playing this demo on Easy or Normal, at least.
The moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty good, except for that one part where I had to fight a bunch of sheep while surrounded by TVs; that part was repetitive and boring. I'm also not too keen on the fact that it's a roguelite, but it has a precursor that's a normal twinstick, and that game's demo is also pretty good (though its levels always loop before you can get enough gems to progress).
EDIT: Almost forgot to mention the demo for Fox Flare Night which is another pretty fun Shmup that saves your progress after each level and whose levels are meaningfully different between difficulties. There’s also a shop you can buy power-ups from.
Puzzle & Tactics
Starting to fall out of favor with the puzzle genre, but I found a few I still liked
The small early levels made me think I could only move pipes one space at a time, but once I realized that wasn't the case, I had some fun.
The sequel to Cosmic Express that also improves on it since while it still has a new mechanic in each world along with a generally low difficulty, previous worlds' mechanics continue to be used in later worlds. Also, there were a few pretty tricky puzzles in the demo, so it's an improvement on that front as well.
This is one of those games where you have to navigate a level using a Chess knight's movements. I can definitely see the subgenre getting old if you've played a bunch of them already, but for this one in particular, I found it to have decently tricky puzzles without getting too obtuse too quickly.
This one has some tricky puzzles, but it can also be gimmicky at times, which doesn't bode well for the full game.
An Advance Wars clone where you can buy and customize special units in advance, then take one or two with you into missions (you can't buy more during missions like you can with regular units). If a special unit gets defeated, it's unavailable for a few missions.
Despite visual similarities to the GBA Fire Emblem games, this one does NOT have hit-chances, which automatically makes its gameplay better. It does have dice that can give you or the enemy +1 ATK/DEF, so there is still a bit of randomness, unfortunately. It also has this weird turn-order system where you can pick any one of your units to move, but after moving that one, one of the enemies gets to move, and then you pick one of your unmoved units, and the cycle keeps going until all of one side has moved, at which point the other side gets to move all the rest of its units one after the other; only then does the turn end and both sides get access to all their units again. Also, the grass biome has some tiles that looked walkable but were actually walls, which annoyed me.
Etc.
Not enough for their own genre-specific spoiler
A hybrid Hack 'n' Slash/Shmup, not unlike Nier, though I feel this demo is a bit heavier on the hack 'n' slash side of things (projectiles don't really show up outside the tutorial and the one boss fight). There's also a bit of platforming, but the jumping controls felt kinda off.
This one's not technically a twin-stick shooter since you have to go pick up your dice before you can throw it again to attack enemies, but it is a roguelite, which is always frustrating. Still, I had some fun with it, and if you like card games, it also includes a slight variation on Solitaire, completely optional and separate from the main game.
A Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker clone. The boss is annoying since there are moments where it'll abruptly become invulnerable so it can slowly hop to the center and do a scripted attack that takes too long, but the rest of the demo is okay.
Also like before, I still encourage you to check out the Next Fests yourself–not just because some demos get removed after Next Fest is over, but because some of the best games end up being really obscure ones that you’ll never hear about otherwise.

sigh…They just HAD to increase the price shortly before I’d been planning on getting another month. Between this and the increasing lack of interesting titles, I think I wouldn’t have gotten one this year if I wasn’t getting these free through Microsoft Rewards. Oh well; the service might not be worth paying for anymore, but I did manage to play a few decent titles:
Roguelite turn-based tactics. You have your standard normal attacks and resource-consuming attacks (though ranged abilities can only be used in the four cardinal directions, which can be annoying at times), but what sets this apart is that the further you move in one turn, the more dodge-points you accumulate, which reduces damage taken the same way staying on a shield/cover tile would. This means that you'll sometimes be able to take no damage from attacks if you can get your combined dodge and cover high enough. It's a unique mechanic that's executed well. Plus, there's no miss-chances or fog-of-war, so you can focus on the main tactical gameplay.
In fact, a lot of the individual components of the game are well made; my main issue is that it's a roguelite. Besides new team members (whose unlock requirements pretty much demand you to beat the game first anyway), the only permanent unlocks you get are the chance for new upgrades to show up during future runs; other than that negligible detail, a single failed mission makes you lose all your progress, forcing you to start the entire 5-8 hour campaign over from scratch. Plus, like you'd expect from a game without fixed progression, the difficulty curve isn't too great, either: on my first run, I got wrecked by a tower miniboss on the third level, and on my second run, I never encountered a single miniboss at all--and that was the run where I beat the game. There were "survival" missions in the late game where I managed to defeat all the enemies and just had to wait for the turn counter to run out, in contrast to the early game where I actually had to survive for the set amount of turns.
However, the worst part was when I finally beat the final boss, only for him escape and the game to cut back to the base without any kind of epilogue or staff roll. Turns out (according to this reddit post at least), the only way to reach the actual ending is to do FOUR MORE RUNS, with each unlocking exactly one new boss fight that wasn't available before. Yeah, I'm not doing all that. If that's what it takes to truly beat this game, then I give up.
Overall, this has the makings of a solid tactics title, and it deserved better than being a roguelite. I wouldn't recommend trying to get 100%, but if you're okay with just finishing one run, I'd say wait for a good sale.
Crash Bandicoot™ 4: It’s About Time
Except when it's about dimension-hopping, which is more often, so their pun doesn't really work
Platformer. Left stick moves, A double-jumps (though the second jump isn't nearly as high and it also kills your forward momentum), X does a spinning attack that not only hits enemies and objects around you, but it doesn't lock or interrupt your movement like so many other games. Bosses even have checkpoints between each time they allow you to deal damage to them, which I greatly appreciate after having to play wait-to-attack bosses in one-hit-death games that don't do this. That said, the game can be a bit gimmicky with how spread out the introductions of each mask power and new character are, as well as how underutilized they tend to be. Heck, the side characters often don't even get full levels to themselves for their limited appearances, with the levels' second halves switching back to Crash/Coco for a harder version of one of the main levels (and exactly how much harder they are varies greatly, from "way harder" to "almost no changes"). Still, level design as a whole is pretty good for the most part.
There were a few moments where it felt like enemy hitboxes were too big and I died from hitting the space beside them, but the bigger issue for me is that checkpoints are sometimes spaced about twice as far apart as they should be. Keep in mind that this is a one-hit-death game, so there's no pretending that this would increase the difficulty; all it does is make the game more tedious by forcing you redo a bunch of stuff you've already cleared before you can retry the part where you died. If there's one trend I really hate about modern games, it's this. I remember seeing the video of the Celeste dev talking at GDC where he tried acting like this was a valid way to design games and would actually make the game harder, and even back then, I remember thinking to myself "No, you're wrong; stop using your platform to make games worse." But lo, Celeste made a lot of money, so the industry blindly follows without thinking about whether its success was because of certain details or despite them.
Plus, you can tell the devs/publisher truly believed that fewer checkpoints was real difficulty because if you trigger the built-in dynamic difficulty by dying enough times, one of the things that changes is an extra checkpoint is placed where there should have been one from the beginning. The other thing that changes is you start with an extra hit before you die, which sometimes makes the game easier, but other times has no effect due to the section's hazards all being instakill stuff like pits. Still, I would have preferred a way to toggle off dynamic difficulty and just make the extra checkpoints permanent from the start.
However, the game is at its worst with how it handles optional stuff. For example, I'd always try to break all the crates in each level, but out of all the main levels, I only managed to do it in one of them (the second level); for all the others, the game would keep telling me that I missed a few somewhere, even when I was confident I'd checked everywhere. On top of this, there are bonus platforms in many levels that'll take you to a short, optional challenge segment (which of course has its own set of crates that count to the level's total). The early ones are decent challenges, but for a few of the late-game ones, I couldn't even figure out what actions the game expected me to do to get through the segment at all, let alone get through while breaking all the crates. Turns out, the tutorials really don't tell you all the controls or mechanics: it isn't until world 6 where the level design shows you that sliding off a platform keeps you hovering in midair until the slide is over, and the game never tells you about the Triple Spin until AFTER YOU BEAT THE GAME. Who knows what other mechanics those bonus segments require that I missed entirely?
And that's just for breaking all the crates. The game also has a set of short, optional levels called Flashback Tapes that you can only unlock by reaching a certain point in each level without dying (so again, more tedium). I only unlocked four of them legitimately, with the rest being accessed by using the Everything Unlocked mod, and ironically, many of these levels are better designed than the main levels. No enemies means no hitbox issues (challenge is still there due to pitfalls, timed blocks, and exploding TNT/Nitro crates), their shorter length means dying doesn't usually make you redo too much, and their linear 2D nature makes it harder to miss crates, so I even managed to get 100% in most of those levels. Unfortunately, when these levels falter, they falter hard. The timed blocks are fine when you're running against the clock, but then the game also sometimes makes you wait for them to disappear, so if you're having trouble on a segment after the waiting but before the checkpoint, you have to redo that waiting each time. This is so much worse than redoing segments in the main game because not only is it boring to have to do all that waiting each time, but Flashback Tapes don't have any grace checkpoints to alleviate the tedium if you die too much. Oh, but the waiting isn't limited to timed blocks; this also includes waiting on fruit-crates to break (they take five jumps) and Flashback-Tape-exclusive bounce-crates to transform into destructible Nitro crates (three jumps for each one). Almost every Flashback Tape where I didn't break 100% of the boxes, it was because I got tired of waiting on the same stuff over and over in order to regain my progress. The only exception was the final tape, which I gave up on entirely because it demanded way too much precision compared to what the controls reliably allow you to do: you have to land on the edge of a bounce-crate while moving away from the spring so you don't die to the Nitro Crate above you, then pull back and do the same thing again for the bounce-crate/Nitro-crate combo above it. I'd sometimes manage the first, but I could never do it twice in a row.
And then there are the four colored gems. The Everything Unlocked mod doesn't actually unlock the gem platforms, so you have to get the gems yourself if you want to unlock those segments, but when I looked up how to get them, it was bad-Adventure-game levels of "how was I supposed to figure that out?" and since I'd already given up on the final Flashback Tape, I just didn't bother with the gems at all.
Overall, I definitely wouldn't recommend trying to get 100% on this game, but if you're okay with simply beating games and skipping the optional stuff, wait for a good sale.
I didn't really notice this until my brother made an off-hand comment about a year ago, but there's been a new subgenre of 2D plaformer for some time now: Celeste-clones. These are distinguished from ordinary 2D platformers by having no real enemies or combat of any kind, with challenge based pretty much entirely on avoiding pits/spikes and with chase sequences instead of boss fights. Also, while they start with a decent amount of challenge, they also don't have much of a difficulty curve, just like their patron game. Sure, Celeste does a lot right, so these games usually won't be too bad, but because they also blindly copy its formula without really thinking about what worked and what didn't, they also inevitably copy some of the problems Celeste had, so they can never be better than just okay.
Between all these games copying both the general formula for Celeste as well as its lack of a difficulty curve, they all start to feel the same--not just within themselves, but also as each other, and this game is no exception. The main gimmick this game does to try to stand out is that pushing RT pokes the ground with your stick, which causes you to jump higher than a regular A-button-jump on solid ground but will stick you to red-cushion ground so you can launch yourself left/right, but this isn't enough to give the game its own identity; ultimately, it just got me confused sometimes where I'd accidentally push one button when I meant to do the other button's action and I'd get killed because of it.
Another way this game tries and fails to set itself apart from Celeste is by giving you new abilities that you can take back to previous areas to get collectibles you missed. The problem here is that this game isn't a metroidvania; it's a very linear Celeste clone, and it misses the point of why Celeste doesn't let the player take the double-dash into other levels: to help showcase that all optional collectibles can be obtained the first time you see them. No matter how hard it is to get that strawberry, you can get it with the knowledge the game has given you beforehand. In contrast, if you're having trouble getting a golden music note, it can sometimes seem like there's no way you can get it at all…because there isn't; you HAVE to bypass and backtrack for it after getting another ability. Sometimes, the game has an optional room in a split path, and in those cases, it'll even display a message explicitly telling you that you have to come back later:

As for the backtracking itself, the game does give you a fast-travel ability you can do by pushing X, but each section only has three fast-travel locations at best, so you'd still have to replay a bunch of rooms you already got everything in before you can try to get the golden notes you missed. Sure, it's better than Celeste having zero fast travel points, but it's a downgrade from Super Meat Boy letting you go directly back to the level with the warp zone you passed up. Oh, how quickly people forget the past…
By the way, even though I took the time to get around 2/3rds of the golden notes, I still beat the game in only around 2 hours and 30 minutes (not much longer than the Steam refund window), so on top of the game not really having much of a difficulty curve, it's also quite light on content.
Overall, it's not a bad game, but it's very much not worth $20 USD. Play the original, free version, play the free demo for this version, but the full game? Even if it were half price, I'd say wait for a sale.
Crypt Custodian
Despite the title, the whole "custodian" aspect is more of a background detail
Fast-paced Hack 'n' Slash with slow, Shmup-influenced enemy projectiles. I've never been a big fan of the hack 'n' slash genre, but having movement-based challenges instead of reaction-based ones combined with enemies only taking a few hits to die really helped this to be an enjoyable experience for me. Granted, it's not always enough to encourage fighting enemies when the game doesn't go into lockdown and force you to, but even running away still results in some challenge since you have to avoid all the bullets being shot at you (it may even be harder to run away in some cases).
The game is somewhat nonlinear. Not only does the map have many winding, interconnected paths, but quite a few of the areas and bosses can be tackled in any order (though there are a few progression upgrades you'll need to access certain places). The downside of this is that it can be hard to figure out which path is forward and which path leads to an optional upgrade, so you'll sometimes find yourself teleporting back to the previous respawn/fast-travel-point to see what's in the other direction.
If I had to say one problem with the game, it's that not all attacks have sufficient warning. For example, the Shmup elements sometimes don't account for the fact that this is a hack 'n' slash: you're often gonna be right next to the enemy/boss to attack them, yet bullets appear and move immediately. And sure, some attacks have red !s pop up to warn you, but others seem deliberately designed to trick you, like how some enemies shoot immediately after landing from a jump despite most enemies just having normal, non-shooting jumps. The worst example is probably the boss Grief: it tries to incorporate your recently-acquired digging ability into a boss fight, but there's no spot to dig in the boss arena at first. What the game does is subtly spawn a dig spot during one of the boss's attacks that spawns thick crowds of spikes across the arena, then its next attack hits the whole stage, so you only have a couple seconds to 1) realize it's even there in the first place since it's graphic isn't all that stand-out, and 2) perform the jump+ground-pound move wherever it spawned to get to safety. Even after you know what to do, it can be a bit challenging, but going in blind, it's quite a cheap hit.
…and if I had to say two problems with the game, it's that postgame super isn't worth it. I tried it since there weren't many other Game Pass games I was interested in, but it just reinforced my decision not to do other games' postgames. Not only does the game suddenly take a turn into arbitrary riddle territory just to gain access, but even after you figure out how to light the cat statues, you still have to find the upgrades needed to light each statue in the first place, and without a walkthrough, that's it's own aimless chore. Plus, the postgame itself is pretty bland and disappointing: the entirety of it consists of 1) a quiz about different story/gameplay details, some of which are rather obscure and easily missed/forgotten (you have to fight six enemies for each question you get wrong), 2) a series of lockdown battles ending with one that's way too long--easily 8+ waves (it's not even in the top 5 hardest lockdown battles in the game; it's just pointlessly long for no reason), and 3) yet more basic platforming across crumbling blocks that isn't meaningfully different than the jumps the game has already been making you do (the enemies here don't even shoot at you, so it's honestly easier). Plus, the cutscene you get after finishing those segments is rather disappointing. The dialogue fits the characters, but it's short and nothing really meaningful or even funny happens.
Wait for a sale.

Bullet hell, no controller support. Arrow keys move your ship, Z shoots to the right, Esc pauses, and the mouse is used to navigate the menus. That’s it; no bombs, no power-ups, nothing fancy that you might be used to from other SHMUPs. The game saves your progress after each level, and there’s an option to replace the eyesore white grid background with actual images, but that’s as fancy as it gets.
Still, the level design is pretty fun. There’s a decent variety of ships and shot patterns, and while there are a few cheap hits every now and then, it never felt like I died too much. Plus, the game gives you the option to give yourself infinite lives, which I recommend regardless because the levels are kinda too long to have to redo the whole thing just because you lost your last life at the boss. The levels promise alternate/harder versions of themselves if you complete certain optional objectives in previous levels, but when I replayed the game to do just that, I didn’t notice much–if any–differences, so I wouldn’t call this game replayable.
That said, it was fun to play through the first time, and its base price is only one dollar, so I can recommend it. You can buy the game here: https://happy-frog-games.itch.io/flashover-megasector
Finally got my Steam backlog back down after that one user mentioned the up-to-date paid-now-free games thread in that one Steam group, so I’ve been tackling my itch.io backlog recently. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much noteworthy there so far. Explobers has an interesting premise, but the execution is lackluster, with the puzzle elements being not hard and the action elements just being you replaying the level up to the point you need to blow yourself up or turn into another platform.
Though I did have to go back to Steam for a bit since I happened to win another game on SG:
Platformer. Left/right move, A jumps, X shoots, and Y uses your grapple. You can also push B to use a subweapon and LT to dodge, but I found myself not needing to do those very much. The game showers you with equippable upgrades and even a few different guns, but not only does a lot of that equipment have specific activation qualities, you also have very limited equipment slots (with the game being much more stingy handing out increases for that), so you’ll find yourself sticking to the same build for most of the game. The game has many rooms where you have to kill all the enemies to progress, which I’ve never been a fan of, but on the plus side, it rarely sends out more waves after the initial ones are defeated, and the differing level designs/enemy placements helps prevent things from becoming too stale. That said, there were a few mandatory enemy killings that didn’t have the HUD icon letting you know about them, which did bother me.
First thing I noticed is that progress in the demo doesn’t transfer to the full game, so not only did I have to replay the desert level where enemy bullets are hard to see, but I also had to go through the early test chambers where the game regresses your build and you’re stuck with that slow-firing pistol. Thankfully, it doesn’t take too long for the game to give you a rapid-fire upgrade to bring your weapon closer to what was promised in the first level, but it’s always a pet peeve when a game starts you out with stuff and then takes them away, more so when it’s like this game where they don’t even have the excuse of it maybe being too overwhelming for new players to get used to.
Second thing I noticed is that the full game is much easier than the demo, maybe even a bit too easy. The sword enemies don’t attack as quickly, which effectively means you can always kill them before they finish running up to you, and the first boss went down super quick with my default loadout (I had to change my equipment to beat the demo’s version of the boss). The rest of the game also struggles to maintain a difficulty curve: you think things are picking up in the desert level when the purple portals send you to the grassy area with the chasing fireball and the orbiting purple balls, but then those hazards never show up again after that level. Even the final boss didn’t put up much of a fight, effectively letting me stand between its hazards and drain its health bar in 10 seconds or so (for both phases). What makes the final boss extra disappointing is that the level prior actually did pick things up a bit.
However, the level before the last one was hard for the wrong reasons. First, it takes away your guns and forces you to use a short-range sword. Second, it introduces shielded enemies, so the sword doesn’t even kill them in one hit unless you try to run past them to destroy the enemy generating the shields (and you also have to notice that this is what’s happening because the game is kinda subtle about it), and even then it can still sometimes take 2+ attacks to kill an unshielded enemy. Then, after making you go through nearly a whole level of that (complete with several kill-all-enemies rooms), the last few rooms add a visual effect where the platforms won’t form until you get close, and then it introduces fake dark-grey platforms that do the exact opposite, fragmenting and disappearing when you get close! You’re also forced to fight a three-phase boss with the sword while also doing timed platforming between the phases. It doesn’t help that this level comes shortly after the two-hour refund window, as if the devs knew it’d be a turn-off for lots of people who enjoyed the game up to this point (the demo also has zero indication that there’d be anything like this in the full game).
There’s also a similar level you unlock after beating the game, where you’re forced to use a super-short-range knife to reflect bullets and you die in one hit, but I gave up on that level after a few deaths.
Overall, the game’s kinda mediocre. I did have some fun with the game, but only some fun in the rest of the game makes it hard to justify the lack of fun in the mandatory sword level. If you’re interested, wait for a really good sale.
P.S. If you play games for the story, then you really won’t like this game since its plot twist just kinda happens and the game ends with a lot of unanswered questions. Maybe it’s funnier in the original Chinese; I dunno.
I tried the Next Fest demo for this one a while back and wasn’t too impressed with it, but after it went free and I saw that one of the updates included level design and gameplay tweaks, I decided to give it another chance.
3D platformer. Left stick moves, A double-jumps, RB dashes, X does a ground pound, holding RT electrocutes things nearby (like switches or enemies), LB and LT use healing/temporary-shield items, and when you reach the final world 1 level, you gain the ability to shrink by pushing B (which disables all your other abilities except moving and double-jumping, but lets you go through small areas).
There are five worlds, each with their own overworld containing four levels, four arenas, one “final” level for when you beat all the other levels/arenas, and some scattered optional items. The overworlds themselves are overly massive and bland, to the point where I’m pretty sure they’re all just store-bought assets with minimal changes; the only real way you can find anything is by using the compass markers at the top of the screen since you’re bound to get lost otherwise. There are some scattered drones you can spend healing items to fix that’ll let you fast-travel straight to any of the world’s levels/arenas, but 1) you also have to reach the drones just the same as you’d have to reach the levels/arenas, and 2) fast-traveling everywhere means you’re skipping over the scattered computer chips that you’ll need to buy upgrades, so you’ll rarely use fast travel anyway.
Then there are the arenas. All of them take place in what is effectively the same large, flat arena (just with some cosmetic differences between worlds) where you have to fight waves of tank-robots that all attack you asynchronously, and when you combine that with how close you need to be to electrocute them, you realize it’s impossible to avoid all of their attacks and you can’t win unless you use the healing items and shields that you’re showered with during the rest of the game. Even if you buy attack/max hp/range upgrades, you won’t be able to keep tabs on all of them and can get cheap-shot by an attack from off-camera. The bots get a few different weapons as the game progresses, but it doesn’t really change anything when you can just keep healing/shielding yourself. Also, the arenas are all mandatory to unlock the worlds’ final levels and to progress to the next world despite being such an obvious diversion from the core platformer gameplay (a diversion that won’t appeal to all platformer fans).
The levels themselves are okay, but they’re all hamstrung by one crucial decision: all the enemies are in the arenas, so none are in the levels. This means the only hazards in the levels are either instakill stuff (like falling in the water) or stuff like the exploding ! crates that stay gone even if they kill you. As a result, a significant portion of all the levels’ challenges involve waiting on moving platforms (boring) and/or dashing across long distances without a platform, and since dashing is always a fixed-length, it’s not easy to aim yourself accurately even if you save your double-jump for the end (and it doesn’t help that your jumps themselves are very fast and heavy). This means that if you fail a jump, the stuff you have to redo is waiting on moving platforms instead of actually engaging with the game, and it starts to get kinda tedious after a while (especially since checkpoints can be a bit too far apart sometimes). To make matters worse, your dashes refill on a cooldown instead of instantly refreshing when you land like other platformers do (even dying doesn’t speed up the cooldown), so that’s just more waiting you’ll need to do. It takes until world 3 for the game to finally start using moving (instakill) hazards that don’t permanently disappear if they touch you, but even then, they mostly just patrol sections of large platforms, and the bulk of the levels still revolve around moving platforms and long-distance multi-dashing. It gets extra annoying when you reach world 4 and realize the only way to beat those levels is to buy max-dash upgrades because you can’t reach the next platform with your default three dashes.
Oh, and the death walls are the same color as regular glass (or at least a very similar color). They’re supposed to have this electricity effect to differentiate themselves, but that effect doesn’t always show up, so it’s easy to get the two confused.
Overall, the game can be frustrating sometimes, but it’s okay for a free game, so I can recommend it.
| 827 | games (+1 not categorized yet) |
| 0% | never played |
| 0% | unfinished |
| 56% | beaten |
| 0% | completed |
| 44% | won't play |












































